Oxide is crossing the chasm (Friends)

26:48And then we, at some point you're going to have a price round, or you're going to have an event that happens in acquisition or what have you, we will price it then. And when we price it, because I'm doing this in advance, I get a discount on that, or I get, you know, there are different ways that people kind of structure those things to incentivize them. But a safe is, or there's a cap. I mean, that's another thing that people do. We'll say, all right,

27:12so I'm going to invest, but I'm really worried that I'm going to invest 500K and then you're not going to raise for like years. And then you're going to raise at this multi-billion dollar valuation. And I'm only going to own a little sliver of this. So to prevent that from happening, I'm going to put a cap in place. So if you raise that above this valuation cap, I get it as if it's at that valuation cap. Um, and the, the, and it's also a way for them to kind of be able to model it. So, but the safes are great for that because you can just like go right now. They can also be too great. They're kind of like candy and entrepreneurs can raise too many safes.

27:49They don't understand that how their safes are stacking and they go to raise their price round. It's like, whoops, you got washed out because you didn't keep track of the safes. Um, So this is actually something. This is where we need like the Silicon Valley outtakes. Because the HBO Silicon Valley, I don't think it really hit on. This is one of the rare things that they need as a new season. I mean, there's so much new fodder. They definitely need this season. Aren't we living the new season right now? Are we convinced that we didn't just like pass into fiction and we are just like, maybe we're living the new season right now?

28:17We're there for sure. I was thinking about some of the money that's thrown around right now because I was reading this Ben Stansel piece all about, you know, and to individuals, you know, like hundreds of millions. to steal an AI researcher from this, from, you know, from Apple to Meta or whatever. And, you know, with that stuff - And they turned them down. They turned them down. On that stuff that you got to know, like, what did you turn down exactly? I think this is where you're just like, can you show me the paper actually that you got? Because it'd be, I mean, this is not a hundred million dollars cash up front.

28:46This is like, on those things, I'm like, I always kind of wonder what they actually look like, but there's no doubt there's a lot of money being thrown out. Still the numbers that we talk about now, you know you just said 500k and that was like because you're trying to think like a number to say yeah like an individual might do or something that's right that's pretty much free money at this point that's right um yeah it's just it kind of boggles the mind how quickly it can't all be inflation that we've ramped up our numbers yeah i mean i think that we've got well and it's going to be interesting to watch what happens because i think the other problem is that the we've got these companies that aren't going public and you know we might start to see some of that where but But like ultimately, like he's having, I mean, certainly the aspiration for oxide is to be a public company.

29:30That is what we, that's what we want to go do. That's what we want to go do. When you said generational, I assumed, well, that's going all the way right there. That's going all the way. Yeah. Yeah. We want to be a public. How, how close are you? So you're, we're actually going to cross the chasm. I'm in a board meeting. I can just raise our series B, you know? No, no, no, no. I don't mean like in, in raises or whatever. I just thinking like in your mind somewhere, there has to be like, maybe not a roadmap, but like you're talking about crossing the chasm. to a generational company and like what is still in your way?

29:58I think, yeah, I do think we're going to, I think we're close. I mean, you always want to knock on wood and everything else. But yeah, I think we're going to, I think we're going to do it. Are there hard problems unsolved? Are there things where you're like, we have to figure this out first? The problems we need to figure out are now are, there are for sure plenty of interesting technical problems that remain, no question. but it's the questions are not around. Can we build that at all? Which by the way, it was a huge question. I mean, we don't want to, that's why your friend laughed at you. Yeah, absolutely.

30:33Absolutely. And you know, the other line he had is like, you realize that if you pull this off, it's going to be illegal to buy Dell. And, and, and that's it, you know, that's it. And so we, but it's a big if. And so there's so much we need to go pull off. Explain that. Why is it illegal? because like you just you would never architect what dell offers like that's not the way you would build it if you're trying to solve rack scale compute at scale so they just say like i don't want to buy just one rack i want to buy 100 racks i want to have elastic compute in my own data center i would not be like okay let me start with a one u or two u server and ac power supplies and each one of these things and like running like let me go invent uefi like what you just wouldn't do any of that stuff.

31:18You're like, let me, what you would actually do is what the hyperscalers have done, which is like, how do I engineer this thing as a whole? And how do I think of it holistically? And the, like, nobody likes the pain that they're in, in Dell HP Supermicro. And it is just an enormous amount of pain because it's not fit for purpose. It's just not what it's designed to do. And people that are, are trying to build, because we did this, We did this at joint people that are trying to build elastic infrastructure on, on HP super micro Dell are trying to do their own oxide on the cheap effectively. And it doesn't work out well, you know, and this is where you discover that like the, you know, you discover drive for, you know, not only discover drives that you've not qualified as I discovered a joint, I didn't even know Toshiba made hard drives until I went, I was, I had such a vexing IO latency problem.

32:10I'm like, you know, And I'd finally, over a course of weeks and weeks, whittled it down to coming from the absolute lowest layer of the stack, the IO layer. And I'm like, you know, I wonder, do I have a different version of HGST firmware on this drive? And I pulled the drive info. I'm like, Toshiba makes hard drives? I mean, it was literally this moment of like, this is not even like a company. I'm like, what? It's like having a Chevrolet hard drive. Like a Wilson driver. Yeah, exactly. You're like, what? what there's like uh there's like there's a raccoon in here like that doesn't even be and you just realize that like oh i'm just being thrusted this thing because of some sweetheart deal as it turns out all the cheap hard drives are basically bought by dell and then just thrusted into that you don't control your bomb with dell and that stuff is so deeply frustrating and that is a deep frustration that people are all feeling this is not like theoretical and i I think one of the things it has been like, it is definitely vindicating.

33:09I think it's like a little bit surprising to even our proponents where they're like, you know, I was talking to someone today and they said that like these firmware problems that you've solved are really significant and important to them. I'm like, you know, you don't have to sound surprised. Like, obviously, we know it's important because we saw that. But like these pain points are really deep and really important. And the people running at scale are the ones who suffer from it. And a lot of why people have moved to the public cloud is because they were sick of dealing with all that. and it's like I didn't have to deal with any of that I never had to deal with a bias upgrade when I'm running on AWS thank God and now but now I'm dealing with this bill that is just like out of sight and growing all the time and it's like oh man it's like can't I own this infrastructure and still have all this delightful stuff that I get from the public cloud and that's the market that VCs didn't believe existed um believe it or not they just didn't think it's

34:17there what's up friends i'm here with kyle galbraith co-founder and ceo of depot depot is the only build platform looking to make your builds as fast as possible but kyle this is an issue because GitHub Actions is the number one CI provider out there, but not everyone's a fan. Explain that. I think when you're thinking about GitHub Actions, it's really quite jarring how you can have such a wildly popular CI provider, and yet it's lacking some of the basic functionality or tools that you need to actually be able to debug your builds or deployments. And so back in In June, we essentially took a stab at that problem in particular with Depot's GitHub Action Runners.

35:00What we've observed over time is effectively GitHub Actions, when it comes to like actually debugging a build, is pretty much useless. The job logs in GitHub Actions UI is pretty much where your dreams go to die. Like they're collapsed by default. They have no resource metrics. When jobs fail, you're essentially left playing detective, like clicking each little dropdown on each step in your job to figure out like, OK, where did this actually go wrong? And so what we set out to do with our own GitHub Actions observability is essentially we built a real observability solution around GitHub Actions.

35:34OK, so how does it work? All of the logs by default for a job that runs on a Depot GitHub Action runner, they're uncollapsed. You can search them. You can detect if there's been out of memory errors. you can see all of the resource contention that was happening on the runner. So you can see your CPU metrics, your memory metrics, not just at the top level runner level, but all the way down to the individual processes running on the machine. And so for us, this is our take on the first step forward of actually building a real observability solution around GitHub Actions so that developers have real debugging tools to figure out what's going on in their builds.

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36:25they're starting to believe though they're starting to believe they are starting to believe and it's it is funny when you know you will have like a vc that you know pass on us or whatever and they will send us a report like oh i just read this report about like you know cloud repatriation and like they send it to me i'm like why are you sending it to me like you should be sending this to your past self like i know this like this is not news to me i mean are you i we also i had another another investor that passed on us that was like um hey i you know um this rust thing seems like i you know do you guys use rust at all i'm like do you use it all like yeah we yeah we use rust a lot i mean we and and he's like oh oh, wow.

37:07Okay. It was that. I'm like, yeah, the company's name is oxide. You're just like, Oh, it's kind of like, Oh God. Yeah. Oh boy. Anyway. Um, well, like you said, they're always late, you know, a little bit late. Well, and I think that they are, I mean, to kind of be sympathetic about it, like they are the, the, the concern that VCs always have is product market fit is that you like the failure mode that they, I mean, there are two failure modes they're worried about. Failure mode number one is this is going to be an outsized return and I'm not going to be a part of it. That is actually a, and that's a real fear.

37:44That's the, that's FOMO. That's the fear of missing out. And that is a very real fear. And they fear that more than a zero because it happens less frequently. Like it is totally, it is very frequent that VCs find a company that is a zero that happens all the time. What happens less frequently and really gets under their fingernails is when they pass on a company that they could have invested in that then has returns a fund for somebody else. That's the stuff that really drives them crazy. So, so they've got like, that's kind of fear. Number one, fear. Number two, in terms of like, they are, I mean, they're, they're not in the business to have zeros, right?

38:17So they actually don't want to have zeros. The, the way you have a zero is that you have a company that builds something that no one wants to buy. Like that's the concern that they have and that you built. And especially like if you've got someone and I get it, like you get someone who's like, no, no, no, like people have built this all wrong and I'm going to build this much better thing. You're just like, okay, now I'm like, I got, you know, antibodies are coming up and you can see why people pass on oxide, but because they didn't see the market was there. Um, the, and then also it actually, strangely, the, uh, there is no other startup doing what oxide is doing, which makes them more nervous.

38:56you would think that you're just like and this is what holds them in like quantum superposition between fear and greed and and we have had vcs who are literally like overwhelmed with fear and greed with oxide and they're just like god there's no one else oh god there's no one else it's like you know what i mean like there's like god the mode is so deep like oh my god there's no one else because you guys are like wrong um and so it you know as that has been um yeah it has been kind of amusing as people realize like oh my god there actually is there is a market there it's like there is a market there yes there's a market there yeah there's so much i don't know if like i'm still just not sure who your you know market fit is specifically i think it's on-prem because it's kind of clear own the cloud that makes sense but there is so much on-prem out there required that they're just like, thank you, Jesus, that Oxide exists.

39:52And they care about the things you cared about from the Toshiba drive. You never knew it was there. The mismatch of firmware, how a sound could change IO and your care for that level of detail. Yeah. Not just the hardware level, but the software that controls all that. I think that's the beauty of it. I would, I mean, I don't know how you phrase it, but I would probably phrase it as if you're the only people who could do it and maybe now that you are doing it yeah you'll have someone enter that is also highly capable and because you've done it they would compete and maybe because you've done a lot of stuff in open source they can maybe leg up because of open source who knows but you know that was always our assumption so my assumption was so when we raised in 2019 my assumption was one of the myths, the first myth that we are going to dispel is that you cannot raise for this company.

40:45And I had many people tell me you cannot raise, you will not raise for this company. No venture firm will ever fund it. And it turns out it's more complicated than that because it's so contrarian that it's actually that FOMO. It does like kind of light BCs up because like, oh, this is like a big potential. And the problem we had actually was much more that this is the next bell. y 'all totally that's right that they would be attracted to it but then also terrified by it and they would be kind of locked in that kind of again that kind of super position and we actually tried to actually this is funny adam you appreciate this they like i did try and i can tell you that like this is where you know season two episode one definitely has some truth to it you do actually want to disqualify from these things to be like no this is like you should not be doing this.

41:34Like, this is not something you should invest in. Like you're a bunch of software investors and they're like, Oh, now we want to invest much more. You're like, no, God damn it. Like, I'm not actually trying to neg you. I'm not, I'm not trying to do what Eric did to you. I'm actually literally trying to talk. And actually there was a, there was a VC firm in particular that was so adamant. And I was like, I'm like, these guys are just like, not kind of technically lightweight. And they just did not appreciate the technical risk. And I'm like, you're never going to get over the line. And I'm like, you don't understand.

42:05We are going whaling. You should be fishing from the pier. Actually, you should be shopping in like the fish section and Safeway. Like that's that is as close to it. And they're like, no, we want to go whaling. We want to go whaling. I'm like, no, God damn it. Like you don't actually know, you don't actually want to go whaling. Like we are going like multi-year mission to faraway ocean. So we assume like we're going to dispel this. We're going to show that you actually can raise. And there'll be a company that raises behind us. And so we were kind of geared for that from the beginning, that there'll be another company that raises behind us.

42:40And so we did one after we were completely done with our seed, like, and that was actually harder than I thought it was going to be. It's like, actually, maybe. And in particular, one of the things we definitely did do with our series is like, well, I'm our seed rather. I'm like, I'm definitely going to find the investors that want to invest in this because they believe in it outside of oxide. And we're going to get those folks on the cap table. We're going to conflict them out of investing. So we will definitely have the best investors for this, which we did. I see. So that's a hedge against competition?

43:09A total hedge against competition. A little sneaky hedge. Yeah, that's an interesting play. The other sneaky hedge that we did is like, I want to make sure that we structure a company such that anybody who's attracted to this, who like, I want to go do this, looks at Oxide is like, I'll just go join Oxide. I just like, I could go to like deal with the whole VCs thing. Or actually like this company is going to give me the freedom and the agency and the autonomy to realize my own personal vision of how this, and you know, one of the things I'm really proud about is like, we have attracted those folks and we've got a bunch of people at different, you know, and at any kind of slice of the stack, I can introduce you to the technologist who's got a chip on their shoulder about that slice.

44:00It's like, no, this slice, whether it's the security of the system, whether it's the efficiency of the system, networking of the system, the system software, it's like, no, no, I have got an opinion about this. And I, I want, I'm coming to oxide to kind of exert that. And, you know, at this point, it's like, we're, you know, we're going to be six years old here in September. It's like, yeah, you're welcome to raise behind us, but man, there's a lot of work to go do. And we, you know, we're still continuing. And we got a lot in front of us still technically, but technically this has been now de-risked.

44:32I mean, you're asking like, what are the obstacles? Like what, what is stance between us? We've got a product, it works, you know, and we've got, I, I no longer hold my breath on an install or, or an update, right? Of course, because I'm saying that there's going to be an install that go the next install is going to go wildly wrong and we're going to come back to this about you know the time that i um but we um and so we're able to kind of level up and level up and level up and get to those those next customers the bigger customers more ambitious customers so uh it's exciting um and the problems in front of us are of that kind of scale variety scaling scaling scaling yeah back on the working for oxide thing you guys are famous for having the egalitarian salaries right like everything's i don't know if that's what you call it, but everybody gets paid the same amount.

45:18Yeah. I call it, yeah. Uniform compensation. Yeah. Because people are like, oh, you think everyone's equal. Like, I definitely don't think that. Well, that's why I was trying to get at with just thinking about raising money and like, you know, people getting a slice of the pie. I'm sure there's equity involved in these people. It's not all cash compensation. And so how does that play out with that? Yeah. You do get people who are like, oh, you're not talking about the total compensation because you're not talking about equity. Well, first of all, everyone at Oxide has got equity. Very important to me.

45:45That's just like important principle for me that everybody has equity in the company. So that's just like bedrock principle. The equity also compensates for risk and risk in the company goes down over time. And there was way more risk in for employee number one than there is for employee number 100. And it's like those are not going to be. And, you know, it is kind of funny that people are like, oh, like, you know, everybody in the company should have if you say they should have equal compensation, which I'm like, again, not the word we use, they should also have equal ownership. And you're like, how does that work?

46:18Can you just walk me through how that works? Like, I don't know, like, you know, you can do this. It's like, you can have an employee owned cooperative. I think, you know, go down to your local organic grocery store, employee owned cooperative. And, and, you know, it's like the, I'm reminded of that old onion headline, local Applebee's hotbed of Machiavellian maneuvering. You know, I think that just like, there are a lot of challenges. It's like, we're sorry, we are not an employee, but that's not our objective. And I also think, by the way, this idea that equity is part of your compensation is misplaced.

46:57And this is a, it's a problem. And this is something that these large companies with product market fit that are public use the fact that they can kind of print these Confederate dollars in terms of their equity. And they use that as part of your compensation. Because if you view equity as part of your compensation, it means that you are selling your equity all the time. Like you're a net seller on your company. You know, you are, you're not buying hold on that. And I just don't think I, and I get where people kind of come from with it, but I, the people don't understand startup equity is not liquid.

47:34Your Google equity and startup equity shouldn't use the same word because they're not the same thing at all. Like they are literally one, you can't sell the other. You can sell one with infinite liquidity and the other one has got zero liquidity. I think people don't often understand what zero liquidity means. And you know, one of the, it's not real. It's not real, but it's not real yet. Yeah. And actually, you know, in many cases, like from a liquidity perspective realized the worst thing that happens is success right because you know company kind of like stumbles and exits and there are plenty of companies that exit for greater than their preference tax they pay out to the common you get your money back and it was like you know you may be disappointed with that it's not it's not the venture return that venture capital is running but an angel investor be like oh this is great like you know i gave you 75k and i got back like you know 91k quite great you know and uh but like not if a company's successful like i gave you 75k like where's my 75k it's like oh it's like sorry we're six years in we're 10 years in we're 12 years in and you know that that liquidity event doesn't necessarily happen for a long time so it's like these are not in the same ballpark and it's like for a startup the like your startup equity.

48:50It's very important that everyone has it. Very important. Everyone has a share in, in that kind of generational future. It's also important that like, that's not what actually pays for the kids' summer camp. What pays for the kids' summer camp is cash compensation. And so that cash compensation is very important to us. So how do you do it then? Do you just offer opportunity for them to buy? We make sure, I mean, everyone, when they, when they join the company, gets equity as part of their package. And then, you know, we re-up people over time again to kind kind of, because it's important that employees have a share in that.

49:22And then from a cash perspective, you know, we have, it's been a little bit tough. We've been in an inflationary environment, obviously. We did just give ourselves a raise. So we are now all making 235, which is funny because like this is, you know, the fourth or fifth raise we've had. And, you know, when compensation is completely disconnected from, you know, performance review processes and all those other kind of bulls**t, like even I will like, I know we've talked about it, but I don't know, like, you know, kind of got final approval too big. Oh yeah. And the all hands, like, by the way, everyone got a raise.

49:56Like, I was like, Oh, that's great. And someone's like, literally will have gotten up and go to the bathroom. Or we, we did actually have this happen a couple of weeks ago where people like, there's a discrepancy in my paycheck. I got paid to market. So no, no, no, we actually gave one, we gave ourselves a raise. Like, when did that happen? Like, Oh, it happened like two all hands ago. It's like, oh crap i was out and i didn't catch the recording it's like well that's the one sorry you gotta gotta pay close attention to when you get a razor out here um but the the um and that you know it's been funny because like that's not a point of principle necessarily although the transparency is a point of principle the um that is something that we have just always done and then when we were uh really struggling to hire struggling to hire bluntly double e's struggling to get outside of our kind of immediate network.

50:43And, you know, one of our engineers is like, I think we should talk about the compensation. And we talked about it. And this is in March of 2021. And that is in many ways, the most important single thing we did in the history of the company, because it brought in so many new folks to the company. And not because they were drawn to the, the, the, it's, it wasn't the fact that it was uniform per se. It was the fact that it represented a different way of conducting ourselves. It's what it represents that's important. And the reason that our engineer was advocating we talk about it is like, when I talk about oxide values to friends and family, they think it's bulls**t until I talk about the comp.

51:23And when I talk about the comp, it's like a record scratch. People are like, what? You're serious? Yeah. You're really serious. Well, no one else does that. Is anybody else doing that? No, not to the best of my knowledge. Not at ours. No one's following you even. Nope. And we've been told over and over again that like, won't scale, won't scale, I'm like, I don't know. Maybe I, I, whatever. I don't know. I've been told, I was told that when we were 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, we're now at 70. We'll be, and, and, or 80 on our way to 90. We, and I would say that it is playing a more important role, not a less important role.

51:57Cause the thing has been, it's had so many like interesting side effects. One of the super interesting side effects is everybody is hiring a peer. and uh when you tell people that they're going to hire a subordinate their standards for that person are going to be a lot lower and they're maybe going to overlook a bunch of things that maybe they shouldn't overlook you tell someone they're hiring a peer and they're like okay i want to make sure that this is like worthy of us right and so it's like yeah it's it is not easy to get a job at Oxide. We are very oversubscribed and we've got people that take hiring extremely seriously.

52:37And I think the other thing that's been very important is that it tells us in a very concrete way, the importance of every role at Oxide. And, you know, because when we first did this, it's amazing. Because we first did this, obviously announced in March 2021, we don't have a product and people are like, yeah, but are you going to play support people that? And it was always like support people. Like this is like a cast in tech. They're less than, and you're like, and you kind of take it apart. You're like, really? We're going to like, do you feel that I want you to think of the very best support people you've ever worked with?

53:20Are they worth it? Oh yeah, of course they're worth it. Okay. Well, what if we only hired the very best? Like, oh yeah yeah i guess we'd make it work then like all right asshole i guess that's what we're gonna go do we're gonna go higher and so it's like and why do you always like why is it always support like so i'm so sorry like support is so hard and so important you are front lines it's the front lines with a customer like what is more and like you have got a it's highly technical it is by the way, like under fire, you've got like always, yeah, we're calling you because something is wrong, by the way, overwhelmed, overwhelmed and multitasked, multitasked, the ability to have the empathy, the ability to have the ability to go technically deep and then to have someone for whom like, no, that's my calling.

54:15That's what I want to do. I mean, there is an upside to it. It's like the gratification you get is a high, high, right? When you feel like, oh, like that is really, and what if you attract people that are drawn to that? And it's like, we have got the best support people you can find. And I love our, and our support folks have been like, it has been such a relief. And we had, you know, one of our folks who joined us relatively early was like, you know what? I've been told my entire career that I needed to be, I need to go into quote software engineering to advance my career. My heart was always in support and I left support.

54:51I went into software engineering, but God, I would love to be back in support because that's where my heart is. And I can do it here. And you look at what they've been able to do here because like there is when you do that, like no one has to feel like I am doing wrong by my career by supporting a customer. no one but conversely no one also needs to feel like well i need to defend the throne room and i better not let this software this support engineer contribute back to the source base because what would that mean that we'd have to like change their pay grade so as a result like we have our support engineers very much contributing to the thing we're building and it's like and then you expand that to not just to support but you you expand that to these other roles the operations roles that the QA roles, roles that like people sadly like look down upon.

55:44In fact, QA is really challenging. We've got an open QA role right now that we're not calling QA because QA has been so like just absolutely looked down upon that we can't even call it QA, even though it's a, we call it product assurance. Maybe we should, if you're listening to this and you, yeah, PA, If you're listening to this and that is your calling, you should be looking to oxide because that's what we're – and it's been a real – it's watching folks come in with that kind of versatility and be able to do the kind of extraordinary things. I mean, this is not surprising, and it's just also not unrelated to the compensation bluntly.

56:25There's a very strong sense of teamwork. and because we have disconnected compensation from because the reality is everyone loves the idea of like connecting compensation to individual performance because like it feels like of course you would like you want like you know but the problem is that just leads you down to a primrose path where whenever anyone does anything they think to themselves does this advance my focal package or not? Is this something that I use my promo package or not? And great folks will not think about that too much. And they will do the right thing, even when the company is not rewarding the right thing.

57:07And we ask people, when are they most unhappy and why? And almost invariably, it's when they are doing the right thing and management is discouraging it. And to be in an environment where it's like, no, we're going to separate all that. And now allow people to do the right thing all of the time, so much more of the right thing just happens. Now, of course, you got to hire carefully. And that's what we do. But we, we hire people that have that disposition, but man, you build a whole company that way. And it's extraordinary. It really, you know, as I tell people, it's like, it's lightning in a bottle.

57:40Don't you dare take this for granted. It's almost like all politics go away. Really? Like a lot of the politics get removed. That could be there. They're just pointless. The politics are like, you know, you know, i had one guy it doesn't get you anywhere you don't get any different because you can't politics uh it's not the scenario because you just can't it's not a lever you can pull it's not a lever you can pull and you know i had one guy uh coming from google who's like and i think and i i you know i i think this is one of the real unfortunate things about companies like google amazon others that that take people who have an a an intrinsic excitement for the technology and they break them a little bit and get them to like, no, no, what you should actually care about is that, that marginal 10, 15, 20 % of your compensation.

58:29And you should distort your life and make yourself unhappy for, you should just like be thinking about that for everything you go do. And as, as he said, like, I didn't realize how much of my brain was dedicated to thinking about compensation until I didn't have to think about it anymore. And I can just think about doing the right thing. And that's really, really, really empowering. And it's been extraordinary. So yeah, I wrote an update on it about how it's going and talking about the support engineering example. Literally the top hacker news comment. I could not believe this. So I'm like, in the blog entry, I am effectively saying, how could anyone, why do we single out support people this way?

59:14And kind of like shaming people who do that. Top hacker news comment, it's like, interesting blog entry but i'm sorry no support person is worth over 200k a year and you're just like you kidding me uh the uh and and fortunately one of the the respondents to that knew one of our support engineers and it's like actually best support engineer i've ever worked with that works at oxide and hey uh will you're worth every penny with a penny so don't listen to these guys well not listening to the hacker news commenters is an age-old tradition that i've and following for a long time. I'm believing everything you're saying and I'm buying it.

59:52I'm super buying it. I'm believing and buying. I might become, I might, at that being said, I might be the guy that says, does it scale? And I'm recognizing that it's continued to for up to 70. Yeah. Fair question. How many people work at Dell? How many people work at Dell? Because I mean, you're going to get, if you guys cross the chasm, like you're going to be huge. How many people have to work at Dell? I don't know. This is a different question. no it's a different question because i they you know and i had i i did i had an investor who turned to me at one point is like you know because they kind of forget that we've done this our investors like they don't i mean it's not something they really think about they know that our team is very good they know we don't have attrition problems they know and also if they looked at one point early on we're doing this one of our investors like you know we did the math And like the, what you're paying people is like dead on the median, like salary per employee that we have in our portfolio company.

1:00:50So it's like, you, you guys are not like off the mark one way or the other. So it's fine. Like, like doing it differently, like fine, knock yourselves out. So the VCs, I kind of don't care. But one of these investors turned to me is like, Oh, because we, in particular, one of our investors was like, I was talking to Steve and it's like, you know, Steve, you've really done a terrific job. And like, you basically, you deserve a raise. And Steve's like, that's great news. That means we're going to give the whole company a raise. And he's like, oh, right, this. Oh, right, you people. You people in this again.

1:01:22You people. You people. But we did, right? We did the whole company a raise. And it was great. But this investor turned to me, he's like, okay, you realize like you won't be able to do this at 600 people. I'm like, you know, I don't know that we'll ever be 600 people. I don't know that. I don't know that you like you really you can't build a billion dollar billion dollar company with lessons. I mean, like nobody has ever done even what we have done. Nobody has even been at this at this relatively small scale. So like I'm just like not I the right answer is we don't know. Yeah. And there are will things change?

1:02:00Maybe. I don't know how many support people you have like per rack or per customer or some sort of metric that you could take and then multiply. to say like, well, at some point, because I looked it up, Dell, I'm fully admitting that they're probably overly bloated, et cetera. They got a hundred thousand people working there. So 600 seems small at scale. Maybe it's not, but it just like, that's not scaling up oxide very much from here. That's a 10 X basically. Yeah, totally. And so I think that like a fair question. I also think that like how many support people would Dell have if they thoughtfully engineered their products, made sure that every, I mean, the number of people that Dell dedicates to telling customers that you're the only one problem.

1:02:46I've dealt with Dell support. Yeah, sure. Yeah, I have to. And it's like the you don't need very many people at a company to support a problem. It's the old Maytag, the Maytag repairman. Right. I'm among friends on this one. Right. You are you. Are you with me on this? I know Maytag, but I'm not sure. OK, so Maytag repairman was an ad from the 80s and the Maytag repairman had nothing to do. And he had nothing to do because Maytag Maytags work. This is when washing machines used to work. So, you know, those of you who have a modern appliance know that this is not true, but it used to be. They don't work anymore.

1:03:22They don't work anymore because it's a terrible economic model. I think that the or that's what companies convince themselves of. We want to build something that works. And the way you build something that works is when it doesn't work, you jump on it and you understand it in totality and you fix it. So the next customer doesn't have that problem. If every problem is only seen once because you've got such an ACES support team, an ACES engineering team, that they jump on it and they root cause every single thing from the very first failure. And they don't need to see a thousand failures, 10 ,000 failures.

1:03:59How many support people do they need? A lot less than Dell has. So that's the experiment we're doing. right so how many do you have now four something like that four or five something like that yeah yeah dang that is a small amount yeah and it's and you know we will continue to hire but like we're going to continue to hire extraordinary folks you know sure and that's the part that i say how far does that go you know you you have to be incredibly vigilant in your hiring which right now you are at a certain point you might have the demand for hiring and you might actually be like we compromised a few times and we're getting out to the mediocre people you know nope nope not gonna do it all right not gonna do it not gonna do it you're gonna that is when and this is where you and and again not to god it's like not to praise paul graham a second time but this is where the two times pr two times i know 100 founder mode 100 and this is where founder mode is actually extremely helpful.

1:05:00Because if you look at those companies, why does that essay exist? Because Brian Chesky woke up and suddenly there were a bunch of people at his company he didn't recognize and he didn't hire. And the failure mode is always the same. The failure mode is that they lose control of their hiring because they don't have good processes to begin with. The processes suck because they don't take it seriously. They know it's like, oh, we want to have a great team, but no one actually understands what that hiring process looks like. They don't actually admittedly I have, I've had some advantages of making some grievous mistakes in my past that for that, that, that forces have a very good hiring process.

1:05:33The not an oxide, but the, uh, they, they, they lose control of hiring. They hire. I mean, I don't want to say middle management is the root of all evil, but you know, it's, you know, maybe a little too reductive, but the problem is that middle management grades their career on the number of reports in their organization. It's like, if you hire software engineers based on the number of lines of code that they write, if that's how they value themselves, like you're going to get a lot of bad code and you're going to get a lot of it. If you hire management that grades their career based on the number of reports that organization, guess who needs more recs?

1:06:12That manager you just hired. Really? We can't do it with fewer people? No, we can't. I need more people. Okay. You're trying to advance your own career. I get it. The, and the, and this metastasizes and you wake up and you have too many people and they all do it. And so I turned to this investor. I'm like, you know what? I don't know if we're ever going to get 600 people. And you know what? We are also the only company in your portfolio that has not overhired. He's like, that is true. Actually. I'm like, you don't have to say actually. And you agree with me, by the way, you don't say actually, but the um and we have not overhired and we are not going to overhire yes that's going to mean that it is painful and requires vigilance and but we've got a we the very writing intensive hiring process we believe it can scale and uh we are not gonna we are not gonna delegate ultimately like every hire is ultimately that decision is ultimately made by steve and yes it's informed by everyone else but like he bears responsibility for and and and that's not going to change and that's just called founder mode.

1:07:18That's what that's called, huh? That's what it's called. I'm always reminded of the scene from Pulp Fiction. I want a wallet that says founder mode on it. Oh, yeah, man. That's a good one. That's a much better reference than Silicon Valley. Bite your tongue. Imagine you're IPO-ing. We need a new season of Silicon Valley directed by Quentin Tarantino. That's what we actually want. Oh, okay. I'm in. Now you're on board. How great would that be? Oh my goodness. Like kill Bill as a startup. You know what I mean? I do know what you mean. Uma Thurman entrepreneur. I just feel like - Where can I put my money to make that happen?

1:07:56Absolutely. I'll bankroll that thing. I don't have very much, but I can borrow some, right, Brian? Exactly. Yeah, I got tons of money. I got tons of money. Yeah, who needs money? That actually makes me think about money management with 100 million in your bank account. Like certainly it's real. Like that's real money. You could just buy government bills and, you know, dollars a year. How do you, you have money managers or how do you, what is that? Reading my LinkedIn. I mean, the number of LinkedIn connections I have had has just gone nonlinear because of course you, I mean, you advertise that you've done this raise and many, many people are offering that money.

1:08:36They would love to manage that money for me. Absolutely. Absolutely. So I just gave it to the first person that came along. So how do you manage it? A hundred percent. Oh, yeah, no. I mean, there's an issue. Like, how do you manage it? Where do you bank? You know, we've got a - Silicon Valley Bank. Is that the one? We were at SVB. We were at SVB when - And I think, you know, Steve will still say the most stressful moment of the company for him was when SVB, we were concerned that weekend and we had payroll to make on Tuesday. Had a 453 or whatever it was, thousand dollar payroll that check that we needed to go out.

1:09:08And, you know, this is where you really, really, really know who your investors are because the ones are just like, I'll write a personal check. And you have investors like, I'll write a personal check. You're like, great, I'm going to need that. And you're like, don't you have anyone else? Sorry, that was like a rhetorical flourish. And then you get that one, which is like, I'll write a personal check. I'll write it now. Don't cash it if you don't need it. And we did have investors who did that. That's pretty cool. um which and so i mean where you bank is a huge issue and like then that becomes a cash issue because you want a real banking relationship because you got all this you know you want to have po based financing and ar based financing and like you that gives so some of that you offer up as kind of a carrot to who is going to really own this banking relationship like okay you we're going to bank with you you're going to get this large amount of money but then in return we are going to get some services from you, whether it's venture debt, whether it's ARPO, PO based financing, what have you.

1:10:10So there's a whole like science to all that. Yeah. Even credit lines too. I mean, you don't need the cash. I mean, you have to have some credit lines because you can't spend your cash. You got to spend it differently. That's right. Tell about how you spend your cash. Well, perceived cash, you know, the bill that you're creating for yourself. It gets. You have a CFO or you just manage that yourself or how do you do it? Yeah, I mean, we've got someone, we hired someone, you know, to help on that. And he's been doing a great job and did the same thing. Did a process for someone in finance, right?

1:10:39Same thing, same compensation, same process, same materials process, same, did it all. And got someone terrific there. It's got, yeah, exactly. Coming from Lenovo, having had done a lot of this stuff and has been, you know, I think it definitely has, we've given Todd plenty to do. oxide. So speaking of big money, there's been lots of big money going into data centers proposed. And otherwise, I think Apple just said another a hundred billion in the States. I'm not sure what that's going to actually be, but they're going to build something somewhere. Kentucky, I think, I think their glass is going to come from Kentucky.

1:11:17Obviously that's not a data center, but manufacturing state side, you have projects. Is it Stargate? What's the open AI one star something. You have XAI saying they're going to put out 50 million GPUs in the next five years. That could just be talk, but they're certainly going to be deploying lots of things. Does Oxide have opportunity in this new GPU based, you know, heavy model training and inference world that's like blowing up right now? Do you guys have a role in that at all? Yeah. So, I mean, I think for sure something to know about that world is it's really easy to focus on GPUs and they're important.

1:11:57There are a bunch of GPUs. We obviously don't, we don't have, we do not have an accelerator based sled. We will at some point for sure. Something we've definitely got our eye on when we do that, it almost certainly will not be focused on those training workloads. We focus on inference on, and then we can kind of talk about that. There's a lot to talk about it in terms of inference. um but i would say that one thing that uh people should be aware of is that there is a lot of general purpose compute involved in what people view as an ai workload so i mean i i've been i'm sure as you've been mesmerized by watching these things show their steps and the number of times like if you give chat gpt or quad an image to do some like i want to recognize some things on this image it will write a python program you know i mean you can watch it like write python programs run those python programs get the results of that it will obviously search the web it will it will do all sorts of things like yeah that didn't happen on gpus that's happening on cpus so just standard servers and apis etc etc yeah blowing up so it's like and also that then like need to be containerized right need to be like you especially if you're gonna have something where like I'm running general purpose compute at the behest of a user of this thing is the best the internet.

1:13:16And, you know, we had Simon Wilson on our, on, on the podcast, on our predictions podcast, which is great. And he was talking about cloud compute. The first thing he had cloud compute do is download a UEFI vulnerability rootkit. And it's like, okay, I'll go execute this thing. And you're just like, you know, so the, that is there's a lot of general purpose compute out there. And I think that one of the, and I think with the rise of test time compute and, you know, you add the way these kinds of models are going, there is more general purpose compute, not less. So yeah, there's the, there's, you know, we'd kind of assume that like, oh, if we don't have a GPU, like there's not like a place for us that's interesting.

1:13:57And, you know, it's always nice when, when customers tell you you're wrong. And, you know, we had our, our first customer god bless them idaho national labs um idaho national labs had to kick our door down because we're like you're a supercomputing facility we're not making accelerated compute we're not taking your call and they're like can we please explain to you why we're interested in oxide and we but it finally seems like i'm just gonna take this call these guys won't leave us alone i'm like it's it's a waste of time but fine and he gets something like okay can we talk for a second because yes we have a supercomputer we also have a bunch of dell vmware that does a bunch of stuff that we need that's not the supercomputer.

1:14:34And can we don't you guys replace the Dell and VMware? It seems like, I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry. We didn't take your call. Yes, we were. That's what we do. That's what we do. I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry. And so there is that analog is where we are. I am learning that I need to not judge companies by what I, my perception of what they need is because I have been disabused of that notion more than once. Well, when you're running like you were, at the time you need to be focused. And so every customer interaction that was not your core audience or even close to it was a waste of your time because you were worried about not being able to even be generational to be able to succeed.

1:15:15So you had to have that, that position. And now that you don't, then you don't probably. I'm curious how all this flavors into sales. Are you in sales mode? What mode are you in now? Uh, yeah, we're, we're down. Oh yeah, for sure. Yeah. We've got all on sales sales as much as possible. Yep. Yeah. And we've got, and again, you know, we're, these are always customers are all no one, you know, everyone has a rack or a small number of racks, but with the idea of like this thing works, I'm gonna go big with this. So, and they, this has all been true for a couple of years now. So it's like, we've got, we're now kind of at that go big moment for a couple of these different customers, which is exciting.

1:15:58So, but we are, we are in sales mode, but like, we're really focused on customers that really need what we offer, which is, you know, not even like a customer that's only going to buy a rack or two. Like, yes, we'll get to you in a while when we truly are, we truly have crossed the chasm, but we, it's, it's the customers that are like, no, no, I want to talk to you about five, 10, 20, 30, 40, 50. That those are the ones that are, that are customers that are, that when we're, and we're blessed to have. So. How big is your sales team now? You've got something like four or five people. Yeah, exactly.

1:16:33Small. Yeah, small. Yeah, that's tiny. And, you know, we've got this very writing intensive process. And is this the right hiring process for sales? Kind of a question I had. Steve felt adamant. Like, no, this is absolutely the right hiring process for sales. And it's been really interesting because you hire. because they're just again it's a way the way people people feel with support like you can't possibly do this support people like you can't possibly expect sales people to write a sentence that is like they're they're animals and beasts i mean like honestly people like no like like writing it's like no it's not animal like you know rips apart customers it's like is it really an animal though really i mean what and what we have actually found is that uh for sure it's different and it's not, you know, but the people that are attracted to that are really attracted to that.

1:17:26So we've got sales folks that were, are terrific and are the ones that, you know, the ones that, that, that can model themselves on Steve, right. In terms of like part of the Steve's disposition has always been about how do we not just find new customers, but make customers delighted, delight customers, find that next use case for, look out for customers, be that trusted advisor for customers. And we want a sales team that go to market team that represents that. And we're really blessed with that. How do you have salespeople make a salary? Not, I assume a commission. Yeah, no, actually there is an asterisk.

1:18:06So the on sales, and we do talk about this publicly, but on sales, there is a commission component. and uh and it was funny because we we when we you know it was a change to roll out because it means sales is commission-based right and so people are like oh well i want that too i like why should the engineers get that like okay well their base salary is less so yeah you can like you also can make less like oh no never mind i don't want that like okay yeah you don't want that in other words like you're taking a risk you you are you're going to make potentially less and potentially more. I can tell you everyone at Oxide wants our sales folks to make a ton of money because they know that like if they make a bunch of money, it's because we're selling racks.

1:18:49So what happens if today one of your sales team just goes out and books like a 50 rack order? A, can you fulfill that? B, how long would it take? And C, how would you go about it? 50 racks. They want it right now. They got the money. 50 would be smaller than some of the numbers our customers are talking about. okay well give me a number that would scare you then well no i mean like that number does scare me but like all the the uh we we've already had to do this exercise for larger numbers you have yeah all right so across that cast i mean that's scale right well well i mean let's ease up but not not across that castle yet okay you're you're out of out over it you're over out over it out over it and it's exciting um and it requires i mean this is where it is like it actually is hardware you're shipping, right?

1:19:37So actually, this is where you need to go into the supply chain, right? You need to go find those log lean time parts. You need to go lean on or leverage partnerships that you've got. And when you talk about like big numbers like that, there's also a challenge of like the numbers get big, right? So now you're like, okay, well, we've got a lot of approvals that we need to go through internally. And there's a bunch of, you know understandably like you're gonna actually like this is a big number and you know like okay what well when can we get it it's like well you know it's we need to get the po before we can you know but we we how do we kind of kick stuff off without having a po in hand because like you don't and this is you know very mindful of we're very mindful of history and everything we do but the history of the osborne computer company right um famously osborne went belly up when it actually had product market fit now there's a bunch and there's a great book great is it maybe in air quotes but a book called hypergrowth out of print um where adam osborne uh gave his version of events but operation they lost it on operations is kind of the the tldr is like they had a product that people wanted and they died because they screwed up the operations of it.

1:20:56And they ended up with too much inventory of the wrong stuff at the wrong time. And they just went insolvent. And so like that can definitely happen. So when you have a customer's talking like, Hey, I want 50 racks and I'm serious. I want 50 racks. And this is not just like pillow talk. This is like, what does this look like? Give me a quote. I need to go like, I'm going to go through my approval process. Then you need to be like, okay, we got to go light up bus parts, racks, rectifiers compute sleds we need to go figure out exactly what this thing is going to look like we need to figure out where the long lead time parts are we need to go on the inventory that's cheap you just procure that that's easy um and then you've got some decisions to make on on you know people buying at that scale need some skew control you know what are i i'm maybe i want different tims or i want you know you've got it and you've got to afford them that there's that that's a back and forth.

1:21:44Oh, what did the, so, you know, it's, it, there's a whole galactic amount of detail. There's an entire galaxy of detail that is not the building of the thing, which already has enough detail, but is the actual, the operations piece of this is extraordinarily complicated. And it's why, you know, when you've, it's why our operations team is, you know, we've got, our operations team is terrific. And talk about like, you know, being just as important as anyone else in the company. And boy, when you go do one of these exercises where it's like, it's serious and we're going, this is like, this is not a drill.

1:22:24And you really appreciate it. Like, wow, this is just extraordinary resourcefulness and agility and being able to, you know, probably unsurprisingly, we've got a couple of our operations folks have got operations experience from the service. I got some, you know, ex-Air Force folks that are used to just like, how do we go deal with like very large scale operational issues and having to make up a bunch of stuff on the fly in terms of like, okay, we can't like your facility, your facility in Toronto can't do this, but there's another facility that you've got in Malaysia. What does that look like?

1:23:07Oh, and then you, oh, by the way, then you have like the Joker in the White House spinning the tariff wheel. Can we, like, this is hard enough, by the way, without being like, there is like, okay, there's a tariff. There's not a tariff. No, no, no, no. Now we're going to have a tariff later. If we're going to do this, we're going to do that. It's like, okay, this is actually hard enough when everything stays still. But, and it's all challenging. And it's a lot of detail, you know, you just have to get, and you've got to embrace that detail and you've got to go headlong into it. And then I think the other thing that's been important for us is then be transparent with folks about where we are and where we're not.

1:23:42Like if we, you know, if and when we hit a snag, we're going to be transparent about what it is. And we're not going to present this to you as like, hey, this is a problem. We don't know what to do. It's like, here's the problem. You know, we've had, we've had an issue here. This is what we're doing to resolve it. Just we're letting you know. And, you know, that is the way we've operated as a company with that deal of transparency. But if you are a Dell HP Super Micro customer, you get these same delays, but it's just like, you don't have any transparency. What's going on? It's like, where's this thing I paid for?

1:24:07It's like, oh, you know, I don't know. No one will tell me. It's like, no, no, we want to be sure that we are giving people that kind of transparency. But it's difficult and it's detail oriented is the answer. It's got to be hard to plan that that far ahead. I mean, do you just spend a lot of cash like holding stuff? How do you reserve? No, no, you can't do that. Right. You just you just made the order just in time. Yeah. You kind of want to be like at night. You're making pizza over there. Yeah, exactly. Making pizza. How many you want? How many you want? I got. Yeah. No. And it's like you want to like hit that balance.

1:24:41Like you don't want to be made to order and you don't want to hold inventory. And so the answer is like the kind of like the answer kind of depends on the part. Right. So you've got parts that are with thin supply chains that aren't that expensive. Like, yes, stock inventory doesn't matter. fortunately the parts that like you would not want to stock as much are parts that are more commodity right so it's like dims and cpus you don't want to have to stock those that's just a lot of money to stock a bunch of those so you need to kind of need and then this is where you also need partners that are gonna really uh and it's been you know it's been fun because we've had a lot of people that have believed in us from the beginning but we've always been like obviously like we're weird.

1:25:24We're idiosyncratic. And all of a sudden we have these demands show up. They're like, Oh my God, this is actually like you, you, you, you nut jobs actually might pull this thing off and you actually do need like big numbers of, uh, you know, of dims or of discs or, or, you know, of boards or of chassis or what have you. So it's actually fun to, to go reward folks who have really believed in us for a long time. It's like, okay, now we've got a big order. Let's go. How many are building right now? Like what's the, can you reveal versions of numbers, not the exact number? Um, you know, I'm not going to reveal our exact run rate.

1:25:59Um, but, uh, let's just say that we're on this knife edge the entire time of like trying to figure out how to expand our capacity as quickly as we possibly can. Uh, have people not, uh, we want to make sure that we're hitting the expectations for when these things are going to arrive. We don't want to have long lead times. Um, we want to, and you know, especially during the supply chain crunch, We saw some very long lead times. So, yeah, I would say it's something we are spending a lot of energy on. If you go to the jobs we're hiring for, you will notice that there are several in the operations area.

1:26:29So this is an area where we are very aggressively expanding because it's got a terrific operations team. What is the lead time? Like, how do you quantify that to us? If I said, hey, I want to buy, I'm super interested. Yeah. I want to buy 50. Yeah, I mean, fortunately. The general response to that. yeah so i'm super interested i want to buy 50 is like not exactly the conversation because like that number is so big that like that's not a like there's the casual conversation four how about i need four yeah i'll buy four right and then you like okay so we start to get like all right we need to get to a po and then we would be you'd be working with our operations team be like estimating a time if you were to buy those right now i mean we our goal is to be at like eight to 12 weekly times.

1:27:14So we would be, and in general, I'm bad. We have been, yeah, exactly. In general, we have been able to move faster than our customers. Mostly that is no longer becoming the case. As the numbers get bigger and the urgency gets higher, that is not going to be the case, but it has been the case that like, no, like we're ready to ship it. We need an address from you. They're like, Oh, we still don't know which DC it's going to. And you know, or what have you. So it's like we've been able to block on. But yeah, we want to be at that kind of 8 to 12 week kind of lead time. We don't want to be longer than that.

1:27:52I know you kind of educated us on like general compute in data centers. Jared mentioned like Starlink, not Starlink. It was Star something, Jared. What was it called? The one in Avalon Tech. It's just a big. Stargate. Yeah, huge data centers, mostly GPU based. Yeah, I mean, is it though? I mean, do we know what that is? They're telling us. I don't know. I'm just reading the headlines. I'm just reading the headlines. It's like, did ChatGPG make that up? is that a hallucination you know you just have like constant you know deliveries to abilene texas yeah i mean and so when you get to a certain size that's what it looks like right when it gets to you you start talking about you know it's 10 more oxides just right there just look at those beautiful 10 oxides just sitting there exactly uh there's 50 oh my gosh 50 right there waiting to get installed yeah and i think that's it begins to look more like okay these things are just like streaming in effectively because you you are buying them as fast as we can make them um and you know we got a couple of folks who are on the cusp of doing exactly that we've been super deep and i suppose money and fulfillment and operations and support very little on the tech though and i'm really curious like what are the major technical feats that you've just accomplished that's enabled this world for you i know the integrated staff like what are some major like things you're truly truly like i can die tomorrow because we did this and i'm happy yes we accomplished the goal what is that yeah just for the record i don't want to die tomorrow so just okay i don't want to get that out of there yeah that's right the the things you understand some euphemism yeah a hundred percent um and there are a bunch of things i mean i i what we've been able to do it it's just sad a sad state of the industry that the bias a a construct that dates back to when i was a child and i'm you know 51 years old uh being able to boot next 86 without a bias is like a man on the moon.

1:29:52And that was extraordinarily difficult. And that was one of those things like you don't pull it off, you've got nothing. You don't have a product at all. Being able to, it's the approach we took to holistic boot is something that the hyperscalers haven't even done. The approach that we took to the switch, the programmable switch, we, and being able to integrate that in with the rack is extraordinary. And I can't believe we got it to work and then Intel killed the part, right? We were using Intel Tofino. Intel killed the part. And so we have had to go find another part. And we were really excited about the part we found at the Excite Labs called the X2, which we're really excited to go build on.

1:30:35And then the stuff we've been able to build on that X2 is very exciting. That's not what we're shipping today. It's really extraordinary. The things we've been able to do with the control plane, with this distributed system that was, you know, we had done several control planes in the past and really wanted to improve on them. And actually seeing that come to fruition, being able to do an update and being able to dynamically update this thing. Because we take a distributed system that we update across an air gap. and you know the fact that you that we are and and when we shipped our first product it was important that we could update this thing at all we had something that we called the the update the minimum update that that minimum update required the rack to be parked you would stop vms update the software and start the vms again which is like great that you could update it at all obviously not like that's not the cloud experience right um and the the ability to build a true distributed system to allow that thing to be updated truly dynamically and to watch that unfold over.

1:31:41I mean, that was a long, long, long software project and required just extraordinary work from a bunch of people and great. And so watching that come to fruition is amazing. What we've been able to go do on the service processor and getting rid of the traditional BMC, we've been able to go do with the root of trust, having a true root of trust, being able to attest all the way up the stack, having the root of trust truly attest the SP, having the SP attest what runs on the host CPU, pulling that together into a trust quorum where you have, I mean, what we're pulling off is really extraordinary where you get this group of sleds together and they themselves decide there are enough of us to share a secret.

1:32:27So in other words, if you just walk off with a sled, you don't have anything, you know, the, the ability to do this with the, with distributed storage, the, I, the, it's the ability to stitch all of this together and then get the power observability that we had always, there's so many things that I had always wanted and I didn't understand why I didn't have them. Um, and now I understand why I didn't have them because we, it's really hard. It turns out a lot of this stuff is really hard, but to be able, you know, the vision for oxide dates back so long. It dates back, you know, for aspects of it over 20 years.

1:33:05And it's not just, you know, it's a vision for a lot of people have had. And watching that come to fruition in so many different dimensions is extraordinarily satisfying. In terms of like the thing that like truly fills me with pride, this is going to sound corny, but it's hand on heart true. It's not the technical artifacts. I'm proud of the technical artifacts for sure. The thing that I am like tears in the eyes proud of is the team that built it. And, you know, when you walk into Oxide, there is a panel from one of the first Oxide machines signed by everybody at Oxide. And that's the first thing that you see when you walk in.

1:33:46And that to me is the most important thing that we've built together is this extraordinary group of fearless, fearless technologists who are wanting to actually go kick the dent that we want to kick in the universe together. That is what is, I think that, and as I told people, it's like, this is lightning in a bottle. We, if oxide were to stop tomorrow, we would all look back on this period of our careers as the apex, as this unique time period in our careers. and that is the thing that is like unequivocal that we've achieved that can't be taken away now we've got a lot further we want to go we want to go um but that is the thing that i am most proud of is that you because when you when you are when you convince someone and this is why i mean hiring is such a it's amazing to me how frequently this gets outsourced to people because when when you're coming to oxide, you are giving to all of us the most precious thing.

1:34:52You are giving your finite time on this earth. And you're going to give that to us and we are going to give ours to you. And that is sacred. In the words of, you know, James Carville has got this in the war room, the documentary that follows James Carville and George Stephanopoulos. He's got this phenomenal speech at the end of the election where he talks about how sacred this is. And it is so important. And, you know, the most important kind of sale that I make, we make is convincing someone to cast their lot with us. And God, that is so amazing. And that is the thing that I am proud, of course, of all the things that come from that and of all of these technical artifacts and these breakthroughs that we've had and the breakthroughs that we will have.

1:35:45We've got a bunch of exciting stuff in our future, but it is the, it is the crew that did it that I am hand on heart most proud of. That's awesome. It's good to be a part of that kind of crew too. Cause I mean, just being able to be that kind of fearless person with a small cadre of people, you didn't have to hire thousands thus far to get there. You had to be in the sub one hundreds to get to that point, which is just wild. I would say that also the fearlessness is very complimentary. There are so many things that I'm terrified about, but then someone else at the Huxley will be fearless about it.

1:36:21I'm like, oh, thank God, hold me, hold me right now. Let me weep on your shoulder. Tell me it's going to be okay. Stronger together. Stronger together. I think I wet my pants. Well, if you're looking for a secretary, I can answer phones for 235. There you go, exactly. I'd love to be part of the crew, and I probably can just say, hello, Brian's not available right now, but leave me your name and I'll make sure he calls you back. There you go. Yeah. Well, should we close? Let's close down the friends and let's do, you want to do a plus plus bonus? I got some current events. I'd love to get your guys' takes.

1:36:55Oh, yeah, let's do it. I got two things on my mind. All right. Oh, I hope you, I hope it's one of my things. Bye, friends. All right, bye, friends. Stay tuned, plus plus people for another 20 plus minutes of Brian. The current events that we discuss, Thomas Domke stepping down as GitHub CEO and the downfall of Intel. Can it be saved? Brian has lots of opinions on that one. Subscribe to listen at changelog.com slash plus plus. That's our membership program where you directly support our work, make the ads disappear and get awesome bonuses such as extended episodes like this one. Oh, and we're also going to publish this bonus as a couple of clips on YouTube.

1:37:38So if you don't want to throw us any cash, but you do want to know what we think about the GitHub and Intel news, head to youtube.com slash changelog. Thanks again to our partners at Fly.io and to our sponsors of this episode, CodeRabbit Depot. Head to coderabbit.ai and depot.dev to check out their wares and tell them changelog sent you. We'd appreciate that. Have yourself a great weekend. Share our work with a friend or three who might dig it. And let's talk again real soon.

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